quests for triumphs were expressed.40
The vote of the senate was vulnerable to objections of all kinds (in-
cluding outright veto of the decision by one of the ten tribunes, as
was threatened by Curio in the case of Cicero’s thanksgiving). If the
claim went through, the senate then arranged that an assembly of the
people should formally grant the triumphing general imperium within
the sacred boundary of the city for the day of his celebration.41 Accord-
ing to Roman law, that military authority was normally lost when the
pomerium was crossed and was only extended by this vote on a special
and temporary basis. Hence, until the day of the triumph itself, the
general had to wait outside that boundary (or, at least, that was the
consistent pattern up to the quadruple triumph of Caesar in 46 bce).
It was perhaps not such a hardship as it might at first seem: by the
late Republic, considerable parts of the built-up area of the city fell out-
side the pomerium. All the same, the exclusion of republican triumphal
hopefuls from the heart of the city is a striking feature of these pre-
liminary procedures. Sometimes that exclusion could last years. Gaius
Pomptinus, who scored a victory in Gaul in 62–61 and probably re-
turned to the city in 58, did not triumph until 54 bce.
This pattern of decision-making seems, at least, broadly compatible
with Cicero’s attempts to secure a triumph for himself. But, as we have
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seen before, such a seamless template for triumphal procedure is also
misleading. This is partly, again, because of the scanty evidence behind
some of these confident claims of standard practice. The vote of the peo-
ple to extend the imperium of the general is not a regular feature of an-
cient descriptions of the triumph; it is mentioned on only three occa-
sions, which may or may not be special cases.42 And this technical issue
is further and almost impenetrably complicated by the theory strongly
advocated by some modern scholars that imperium in itself was not a re-
quirement for a triumph, but more precisely the “military auspices”
(auspicia)—which regularly, though not always, came with imperium. 43
More practically, the occasional references to “laureled letters” are cer-
tainly not enough to prove them a permanent feature of the procedure.
(Where, after all, did the laurel come from? Or did every general pack
some in his luggage, just in case?)44 Worryingly too for the idea of a con-
ventional idiom of triumphal requests, Cicero’s formal dispatches to the
senate bear no especially strong resemblance to the style of the Plautine
parodies. But, even more serious problems and inconsistencies underlie
the standard account of procedure.
I have already noted that an adverse senatorial vote did not necessarily
impede a valid triumph.45 Why then go through the senate at all? One
practical consideration may have been financing. In discussing the dis-
tribution of power in the Roman state, Polybius reflects on how the sen-
ate exercised control over generals. Triumphs, he argues, were one of the
senate’s weapons: “For they cannot organize what are known as ‘tri-
umphs’ in due style, and sometimes they cannot celebrate them at all,
unless the senate agrees and provides the funds for the purpose.” One
“unauthorized” triumph is certainly said, albeit by a much later author,
to be held at the general’s own expense.46 Yet financing cannot be the
only issue: after all, some of the most successful Roman commanders
would have had little trouble raising funds independently, while Cicero
was still anxious about the expense of a celebration even when he was
anticipating senatorial approval.
More puzzling is how a general could triumph legitimately with the
backing of neither the senate nor an assembly of the people. This seems
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to have been the position of Appius Claudius Pulcher, who in 143 noto-
riously rode roughshod over the will of both senate and people in pro-
ceeding with the ceremony. The story was that his daughter (or sister)
who was a Vestal Virgin leapt into the triumphal chariot with him, to
give him religious protection against the attack of a hostile tribune.47 But
how, in these circumstances, without a vote of the people, was the neces-
sary imperium extended? We simply do not know. One modern scholar
has ingeniously speculated that Appius Claudius might have used the
good offices of the priestly college of augurs (with which he had strong
family connection) to invest him with the appropriate auspicia instead
of relying on the assembly.48
In fact, this is only one of many areas where considerable ingenuity
must be deployed to make sense of the supposed triumphal rules on im-
perium. Why, for example, did magistrates who were celebrating tri-
umphs during their year of office (when, according to modern recon-
structions of Roman law, they possessed imperium within the pomerium
anyway) need to go through the formal process of extending their au-
thority? Perhaps they did not. Maybe, as some have argued, this was a
necessary step only for those attempting to triumph after their year of
office had ended (which might help with the Appius Claudius problem,
whose celebration took place during his consulship).49 Yet, if that were
the case, why did they also need to stay outside the pomerium up to the
moment of their celebration? Maybe more than one kind of imperium
was at stake here—and what was being granted to the triumphing gen-
eral was specifically military authority within the city, which even serv-
ing magistrates did not possess.50 But, again, why the emphasis on not
crossing the pomerium? If there had to be a special grant anyway, why
could it not be made after the general had entered the city?
Perhaps, as others have suggested, this prohibition on crossing Rome’s
sacred boundary is not specially connected with imperium or the other
aspects of legal authority which that implied, but harked back to differ-
ent form of “ceremonial inhibition”—the idea perhaps that the triumph
was originally an “entry ritual,” which could not properly be celebrated
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205
if the pomerium had been crossed and the city already entered.51 Answers
can be devised for all these questions. But as no ancient definition of im-
perium survives, nor any definition of its possibly different varieties (military, domestic, and so on), those answers are inevitably modern con-
structions.52
The varied evidence we have clearly suggests that we should not be
thinking only in terms of a fixed and regulated procedure, even in the
later Republic. The ceremony of triumph was not merely an extraordi-
nary public mark of honor to an individual commander; it also involved
the entry into Rome of a general at the head of his troops. This broke all
those key cultural assumptions of Roman life which insisted on the divi-
sion between the sphere of civilian and military activity, and which un-
derlay many of the legal niceties that grew up around the idea of the